manufactured products

For several decades, manufacturing in the automotive sector has made a strong contribution to spurring national growth, to promoting technology acquisition, and to raising incomes for workers across skill levels in developing economies as well as in developed nations. In India – the world’s sixth-largest producer of cars, where the automotive sector has been growing but at well below its tremendous potential – productivity levels would need to increase rapidly. A wave of autonomous functionality in vehicles and other technology-driven disruptions are not far away with the involvement of tech giants like Google, Tesla, and Uber. This makes the need to improve productivity in order to respond quickly to changing environments even more critical for traditional automakers.

Some long-awaited reforms in India to improve automotive manufacturing performance came through this year. In July, the Government of India implemented a unified Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime to replace the multiple taxes that had been levied, in the past, by the state and central governments. This makes for a more integrated market, with uniformity in tax rates where automakers will be helped by easier compliance, the removal of cascading effect of taxes and the reduction of the costs of doing business. Reinforcing this, the union budget allocation in February allows for more investments in roads and highways, farm-friendly policies and income-tax reform for the middle class. Those steps will increase demand for small passenger vehicles and for the farm-equipment segment. This is all good news for the automakers in India.

Still, much more needs to be done to increase overall productivity in this job-creating and technology-rich sector. According to a recently published report by the World Bank Group, entitled “Automotive in South Asia: From Fringe to Global,” productivity (measured by value added per worker) in India’s auto sector remains less than one-third the level of China. From 1993 to 2004, the growth rate of Total Factor Productivity in China’s automotive sector was 6.1 percent per year, compared to only 1.1 percent in India. The growth rate of labor productivity was 9.8 percent per year in China, compared to 3.1 percent in India. Even though India has been increasing production of units at 11 percent to 15 percent per year (from 2005 through 2015) , it could do much better on improving productivity levels.

For many African countries, one important way to create productive jobs is to grow the labor-intensive light manufacturing sector, which would accelerate economic progress and lift workers from low-productivity agriculture and informal sectors into higher productivity activities.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s low wage costs and abundant material base have the potential to allow light manufacturing to jump-start the region’s long-delayed structural transformation and over-reliance on low-productivity agriculture. Moreover, as globalization advances and China evolves away from a comparative advantage in labor-intensive manufactured products toward more advanced industrial production, African economies such as Ethiopia and Tanzania are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this opportunity.